Fr. Ragonton and the Trees by Claudio V. Tabotabo, MA (December, 2005)

I was only trying to recall things that will spark remembrance of our departed padre. But it was all that I had, the thought of the poem, The Tree by Joyce Kilmer.

Fr. Ragonton was a priest and I was his acolyte. He was strict and an epitome of refinement while I had no identity of the kind. But when things went serious I told him I was going to the seminary. He said, "No, you cannot". "With difficulty to speak Cebuano he added "Butakal ka". Butakal is a Cebuano word for hog. It is a regional version for playboy.

I knew that at the back of all he said was the desire to let me go. It was his early attempts to push me go in a guise of discouragement. I thought it would progress as planned. But everything went differently. He died while I became a teacher and to completely forget the cloistered life I had desired, I went to Manila as teacher and finally got married.

At Saint Estanislao Kostka College in the province of Zamboanga del Norte one can find giant Acacia and Nara trees making canopy over the ramshackle building. Fr. Ragonton planted them all.

When he came to Mindanao in 1952 fresh from the San Jose Major Seminary, the first thing that came to his senses was to put up a school. But before his parishioners found signs of the school, they saw the young priest worked hard to planting trees. He himself scooped the soil with his bare hand and everyday he himself watered the plants. Time went on the school was put up until its paint cracked and naked wall turned gray but the plant went on blooming to perfection.

We boys used to capture spiders around the school. We saw Fr. Ragonton sitting on one of the protruding roots of the Acacia. He was a voracious reader and under the tree read. One day in one of our journeys to say mass to the mountain barrios, he asked for a piece of paper then wrote the Greek translation of the poem The Tree. He handed to me the paper and said to memorize it. I learned later that it was himself who made the translation when he was a college student at the Ateneo de Manila.

Few years latter as I looked down at the face of the dead priest the memory of the paper came to me. I can only picture out the crooked writing and the first line that say, I mean pericanus peregmatus a tutuam, I'm not sure of the spelling. In English it is, I think that I shall never see. No matter how, the last line of the poem says poems are made by fools like me but only God can make a tree.

The wisdom of man is foolishness compared to God. The knowledge that we have is nothing as long as it is not pleasing to God.

Now storms come and go leaving the people crippled while the trees stood unbend from any form of trials. For me I had not memorized the poem. It was a failure to do a simple token of friendship. But it was through and nothing can be done about it. The saddest side of memory is its invulnerability to corrections. We cannot undo what had been done. Our journey can be rerouted to another direction but never the past. Yet memories are always good because they are permanent.